Steve Jobs Created The Computer That Gave Us The World Wide Web

This is the NeXT Computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the world wide web.

CERN has given us many things in our day, most notable among them recent proof of the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson… one of the most elusive objects in particle physics. But like the Higgs Boson, most of CERN’s achievements are pretty exotic.

On April 30 in 1993, though, CERN gave us something it gave all of us something we all use to this day: the worldwide web, software and technology that anyone could use (and everyone did) to build what we, today, called the Internet.

Like many of the revolutions of the computing age, though, the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.

A NeXT Computer — created by NeXT Inc., Steve Jobs’s computer company during his ‘wilderness years’ — was used not only to host the world’s first web server, but to write the first web browser.

Twenty years later? NeXT was purchased by Apple, Steve Jobs came back to the first company he founded, its core technology was baked into the OS X, and the spiritual descendent of that primitive web browser — Safari — is installed on hundreds of millions of Macs, PCs, iPads and iPhones all over the earth.

Incredible how far we’ve come in just twenty years. What will the internet of 2033 look like, and how much will it owe to Steve Jobs then?